Do We Even Know What’s Happening To The Federal Government?

Nothing about her last few years at the U.S. Agency for International Development could have prepared Jasmine* for the last two and a half weeks at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Jasmine (a pseudonym to protect her identity) was among the 2 million civil servants who got an email last week offering a buyout in exchange for a voluntary resignation. (She did not take the offer.)

Late Sunday night, Jasmine got an email from someone in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) telling her not to work in-person on Monday. After business hours that night, she received the same instructions via email for Tuesday.

Now Jasmine doesn’t know what’s going on. Sidelined at home, she’s disturbed by reports that Musk’s deputies are trying to enter her physical office and gain access to its systems. One of her colleagues is stranded in Nairobi without access to their work email or a way to get home.

“It’s only been two weeks. Only two and a half weeks of everything,” she said, referring to the new administration. “All of the emails are coming out very late in the day or in the middle of the night with very little warning. It’s definitely a very markedly different tone from any agency notices that have gone out prior to this time, as long as I’ve been working at USAID.”

USAID, the federal government’s primary humanitarian aid agency, is the tip of the spear in Donald Trump’s escalating war against his own government. Driving the effort is Musk, the literal richest man in the world, who is at times gleeful about the nuking of middle-class jobs. DOGE has steamrolled into government agencies including the Treasury Department, which handed over confidential payment information that includes taxpayers’ Social Security numbers to Musk’s task force.

Trump has also done plenty independently of Musk. He began his second term with executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the federal government. He fired officials charged with the oversight of more than a dozen federal agencies — many of the same agencies that were simultaneously blindsided last week by a vague memo pausing federal grants while the White House reviewed which programs are too “woke”.

There are tons of questions and lots of confusion about what’s happening right now in the federal government — such as: Is any of this legal? What can be done? Here’s some of what we know, what we don’t know, and what we hope to know about Trump’s efforts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.

What’s the status of… everything?

Trump’s early success rate is mixed.

As of Tuesday, roughly 20,000 workers, or 1% of the federal workforce, had accepted the administration’s “buyout” terms, which essentially allow employees to stop working while collecting a paycheck through Sept. 30. That is below the 5% to 10% threshold the administration had set as a target. Federal workers still have through Thursday to accept, though unions and other critics are urging them not to sign anything.

A group of unions representing federal workers sued the Treasury Department on Monday after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave DOGE access to its confidential payment system, which sends out tax refunds and other payments on behalf of the government. The complaint called the move a “massive and unprecedented” intrusion of privacy.

“People who share information with the federal government should not be forced to share information with Elon Musk or his ‘DOGE.’ And federal law says they do not have to,” read the complaint from the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday declared himself the acting director of USAID, which Rubio says will get absorbed into the State Department, though there are questions about whether that can happen without congressional approval. The agency’s brick-and-mortar headquarters remained shuttered Tuesday after more than 600 USAID employees were put on leave. USAID’s future is uncertain after Trump said it will refocus to serve only the poorest countries.

Trump’s memo outlining an across-the-board grant freezewhile the administration reviews existing federal grants and recipients is tied up in the courts. The measure was blocked last week by a judge who sided with two dozen states seeking an emergency order to keep the grants flowing. Another judge extended the pause Monday, arguing the administration may have “run roughshod” over congressional authority with “potentially catastrophic” outcomes for organizations that rely on grant funding.

It’s not clear which, if any, programs are currently impacted. The website that states use for Medicaid reimbursement went offline last week but was later restored. Head Start providers in Washington state and Pennsylvania reported glitches Tuesday in the reimbursement portal, even though the Justice Department said it has instructed agencies to keep handing out grants while the challenge to the order works its way through the legal system.

What is this really all about?

Taken together, Trump’s actions are testing the limits of executive branch power in an effort to expand it for generations to come, said Elaine Kamark, a senior policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and lecturer at Harvard University.

“Every single bureaucrat has two masters — one is the president and one is the Congress,” Kamark said. “And what Trump’s doing is a massive expansion, or he’s trying a massive expansion, of presidential power, of executive power. And most of this, my bet is, is going to be deemed unconstitutional because we have a separation of powers. The Congress makes laws and the executive implements laws.”

Sarah Binder, a George Washington University political science professor and a fellow at the centrist Brookings Institute agreed that Trump is engaged in an “intense, precise effort to hoard power in the executive branch and diminish any challenges to his executive power. That’s clearly the motion and the intent coming from Trump and his advisors.”

Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, said Trump is trying to foster a less liberal federal workforce — a draining of the so-called swamp that Trump promised, but did not deliver, in his first term.

“Certainly there’s this perception of — whether you call it a deep state or just a professional political class that has a liberal bent, that is embedded in the federal government,” he said. “This view holds that they direct executive branch authority in ways they see fit. That they reward organizations outside the government with grants. And that this whole kind of ‘blob’ as it’s often called is just not responsive to the people, not [responsive] to Congress — and during the first Trump administration was largely unresponsive to the president. And so this new administration is just taking a very big run at this entity.”

Is any of this legal?

That’s what we’ll find out in the weeks and months ahead, as the courts and legislative branch sort out how to respond to Trump’s sweeping mandates — while Trump’s primary tactic in the meantime is to overwhelm and confuse.

The president cannot unilaterally get rid of an agency legislated into existence by Congress. But Trump is testing the degree to which he can get around programs that aren’t protected under statute.

“I mean, much of this, on the face of it, is aptly illegal,” Kamark said. “There are rules for how you lay off people in the federal government, if you decide to do a reduction in force. You don’t decide the Education Department doesn’t exist anymore. The problem these people will face is that most of the federal government does not exist to irritate Donald Trump or any other president. Most of the federal government is there by law.”

Kosar said Trump and Republicans are snatching power in a way that could backfire once a Democrat is back in the White House.

“There’s a way to do this within the Constitution and the law. If you just rely on presidential unilateralism with a weak legal basis — congratulations, you’re creating a precedent,” Kosar said. “And the next time we have a Democrat in the White House, that’s going to be a basis for Democratic unilateral presidential action. Is that really what you want?”

Binder said Trump seems to have no interest in following the law and respecting the balance of powers.

“That is entirely new,” Binder said. “When all is said and done, is this effort going to be ground down the way most overreaching gets ground down in American politics” — through delay, political bottlenecks, court fights and public opposition?

What about Congress?

Congressional Republicans, who control both the House and Senate for the next two years, have not given much of an indication they plan to stand in Trump’s way, though some seemed uneasy with the general lack of program review.

“They’re going to see how far they can go,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-S.C.) said, arguing that both parties try to grab power when they control the White House. “I don’t begrudge them for doing it.”

Tillis told HuffPost it’s possible to assess spending and cut back without impacting an agency’s core functions. “At the end of the day, if you just shut down every program in there, I think it’s a mistake, and I think it’ll have policy and political consequences,” he said.

Democrats, who were effectively shut out of power in November, can offer little more than broadsides against Trump before the next election without Republican buy-in.

That might change in the midterms if the electorate is sufficiently alarmed or exhausted by Trump’s actions. While Democrats aren’t likely to win back the Senate for at least a decade, Republicans have a slim margin in the House that Democrats could conceivably reverse in two years.

If USAID is the tip of the spear, what’s next?

Trump himself and many Republicans have long had it out for the Department of Education, which they’ve accused of promoting racial division and DEI. The president vowed to eliminate the department altogether during his campaign.

Those Republicans may be getting their wish, with Trump and DOGE reportedly weighing drastic cuts to programs that aren’t written into statute. Trump may also ask Congress to shutter the $79 billion agency entirely.

Eliminating the DOE was part of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, a policy blueprint for remaking the federal government with political appointees and a stronger executive branch. Trump tried to distance himself from the proposal during the campaign, but it’s clear he’s carrying out Project 2025 if not to the letter, then at least in spirit.

Should people be worried?

It depends who you are and what you worry about.

Republicans who supported Trump may celebrate the sweeping changes he’s trying to achieve — without losing sight of the fact that Democrats down the line can also take advantage of a government with fewer checks and balances thanks to the precedent that Trump and his allies are trying to establish.

Democrats may be watching with terror at what’s unfolding in Washington.

“We don’t know whether Trump is irreparably changing the course of American government. We don’t know that yet,” Binder, the George Washington University professor, said.

“Trump is only going to be dissuaded by bond markets and stock markets reacting quite adversely, some broader public push against him and some set of legal constraints. Or Republicans on the Hill telling him it’s time to pare it back — not that I anticipate that happening too soon,” she said.

Kamark, the Clinton administration adviser, is confident there’s nothing Trump can do unilaterally that cannot be reversed by Congress or the courts. And for all the hand-wringing among Democrats about the conservative Supreme Court, she noted that only 11% of the federal judiciary is composed of Trump appointees.

“There has been some expansion of presidential power over the years, but we’ve never had a president who had such an aggressive attempt at broadening executive power, and we should be fearful, because he is breaking all the long-established norms of shared powers that were in the Constitution,” she said.

“So yeah, it’s scary. I’m not sure it’s going to succeed, but it’s scary. And if Congress and the courts let it succeed, we will come out of this with a much, much stronger president than we’ve ever had before.”

Jasmine, the USAID employee, said she feels like the “guinea pig” for Trump and Musk’s anti-government experiment.

“I think that is also part of why we’re really trying to hold up as much as we can. Because you can get rid of USAID, then what comes next? I have plenty of friends who work at different agencies — CDC, EPA — who are also going through various things, but it seems like they’re trying to break USAID first, and then what?”

Jonathan Nicholson contributed reporting.